Robert Hart

Robert Hart, who has died aged 86, spent a lifetime pursuing his own vision of sustainability - a nation of back gardens filled not with grass, decking, or landscaped water features, but with small, verdant, productive forest gardens, which, taken together in towns and cities, would make up great urban forests. His legacy is a methodical approach to devising gardens that provide pleasure, health, home-grown food and spiritual solace.

Hart intended the forest garden - so called because it replicated the plant layers of a forest - to be a "comprehensive answer to two closely related problems: large-scale degradation of the natural environment and the colossal toll of avoidable ill-health". The idea was born out of a quest to relieve his suffering from childhood pain, and that of his mentally handicapped brother, for whom he cared for many years.

Born with difficulty - both he and his mother nearly died - in London, he was the son of an international lawyer and a talented soprano, who rejected her career for motherhood. She was a strong influence on him, as was his grandmother, from whom he acquired a love of the Bible and a belief in miracles through spiritual faith.

Hart was educated at Westminster school, before going to work for Reuters news agency. There he was put in charge of the special Indian mail service, for which he made digests of weekly articles by Mahatma Gandhi. This early discovery of Gandhian philosophy, with its emphasis on a search for truth, stayed with Hart throughout his life. He believed in what he called the science of love, and always tried to overcome adversity through positive thinking.

At the outbreak of the second world war, he and his best friend, Michael Asquith (grandson of the Liberal prime minister), intended to register as conscientious objectors, but after the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940 it seemed disloyal to do so. Thus Hart left Reuters to work as a military policeman, and then in the intelligence service, breaking codes.

Postwar, he became a dairy farmer in Norfolk and Somerset, before making his final home on a smallholding at Wenlock Edge, Shropshire. He worked out his distinctive approach to horticulture in his own garden, and published the results in Forest Gardening (1996) and Beyond The Forest Garden (1998).

In Hart's words: "Forest gardening offers the potential for all gardeners to grow an important element of their health-creating food; it combines positive gardening and positive health . . . The wealth, abundance and diversity of the forest garden provides for all human needs - physical needs through foods, materials and exercise, as well as medicines and spiritual needs through beauty and the connection with the whole."

The model for this practice was the British deciduous woodland, analysed into seven layers - from tall trees, via climbers and shrubs, to ground-cover plants and roots. But the range of suggested plants also encompassed the exotic - such as the Nepalese raspberry and kiwi fruit - and, in fact, anything which would grow productively without disturbing the balance. Hart's system combined fruits, nuts, herbs, salad plants and vegetables in a self-sustaining perennial system without external fertilisers, either man-made or of animal origin, in line with the vegan principles he ultimately adopted.

Following the death of his mother and brother, Hart lived alone in Gandhian simplicity, surviving without many modern conveniences. When I first visited him, fresh from the city, I was shocked to see him washing our dinner pots in the stream that ran by the side of his garden. It was cold and damp, but his obvious frailty did not prevent him from taking me on a long and energetic tour. I saw the winter bones of his cherished garden, and left humbled by its gentle plea for sanity. Robert Hart, forest gardener, born April 1 1913; died March 7 2000